


A Million Little Gods

by Kanthia



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Egregious use of high school mathematics, F/M, Jane Foster Loves Science, Leaning on the Fourth Wall, Shameless Self-Indulgence, Worldbreaking, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-13 02:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14740107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: There is no force in the universe as powerful as a narrative approaching its climax. [Infinity War from Jane Foster's perspective - Part 1 spoilers]





	A Million Little Gods

**Author's Note:**

> [i guess we'll just have to adjust](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zdNdjF-htY)
> 
>  
> 
> find me yelling about mathematics on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com)

If you asked Jane Foster what space smelled like, she’d tell you it smelled like nostalgia: metallic but oddly sweet, with the barest hint of burnt flesh, or seared steak; a smell that took her back to summers in grad school repairing old machinery with an arc welder and a carefree lack of adherence to safety regulations one associates with young adults. She’d idly hypothesized as much about the smell of space in her childhood, had been proven very much correct.

Everything else she’d known -- _they’d_ known, _they_ being humanity as the species, the concept -- about space had been wrong: the distances between planets are manageable in a single afternoon if one has a sword and a friend managing the Bifrőst; sufficiently advanced carbon-based life-forms trend towards absurdly similar shapes, the upright biped a sort of intergalactic asymptote; aliens speak English with a lilt that reminds one of a middle school Shakespeare skit, have governments and digestive systems and spats with their siblings; Clarke’s Third Law was, it turned out, a surprisingly good way to parse xenotech after all.

It’s almost -- _almost_ \-- unfair how simple it all ended up being, the profound normalcy of life out there in the cosmos. It has everyone from the microbiologists to the quantum physicists scratching their heads in their labs. Thankfully (thankfully?) every answer belies thousands more questions, and if God’s just a man with a hammer, then she’ll keep asking _why_ and _how_ and _on whose authority_.

\-- Besides, if you asked her to describe a pleasant memory, she’d show you the page in her notebook where that same man doodled a tree from memory, wrestled space into curved lines and rivers, saying _you see it every day without realizing_ : the spiral arms of the Milky Way are curved like an ellipse, the branches of Yggdrassil curved like the branches of a hyperbola, but how similar are those equations to one another, and at their joining-point is the equation of a straight line.

She met him, thanks for asking, in the outskirts of Galisteo, New Mexico, population two hundred and change. She hit him with her car, and then her intern tased him; it was an odd day. Just a lost soul out looking for his hammer and his father’s approval, less Cain and Abel and more that song by The Fray: _I said, where you been? / He said “ask anything”._

And had she known what his brother was planning on doing -- well, she’d have done a lot worse than tase him, would have marched up the Bifrőst right then and there and wrung his scrawny little neck; but that’s the beauty of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. You can know where someone is or where they’re going, but never both.

“-- But I’m getting ahead of myself again,” she says, knowing that she’s rambling. It doesn’t matter what she has to say, regardless. This is supposed to be a lecture circuit about her emerging theory of simultaneity and its apparent, but not inherent, contradictions to Einstein’s relativity, but they’ll cling to her every word regardless and often in spite of what she has to say. “Einstein wasn’t wrong,” she’d say to the theatre packed full of reporters and college kids and scientists and whoever could afford whatever outrageous ticket price whatever university she was visiting that week was charging. “I wonder, sometimes, what he would have thought of had he stayed in Germany, if Schmidt had let him see the Tesseract.”

“Then we wouldn’t have Cap,” someone yells from the throng, and there’s murmured sounds of agreement. Never mind the Second World War. Nobody really wants to know about her research, of course. They want to know what Asgard was like, if she’d ever met Captain America, or -- most importantly, it seems -- if she’d ever had sex with Thor, which would make her the first human on record to fuck an alien. The infinite and interrelated mysteries of the universe can wait.

(The answers, in respective order: like Peter Jackson’s Rivendell mashed up with the bridge of the Enterprise in _The Next Generation_ ; no, though she did briefly cross paths with Banner at a particle physics convention in Geneva; yes, goddamnit, yes. He would spread her on a blanket on the floor of her apartment for fear of breaking her bed, spend eons preparing her for what was always felt like a little too much for her tiny mortal frame, mutter words in a language she barely understood, make love to her like she was the only thing in the universe that mattered. He was huge and thick and heavy, human in shape but with the bone density of a neutron star. He was the truth in Sagan’s quip about star stuff.

Had he ruined other men for her? No, thanks for asking. He was sensitive and affectionate and charming and witty and very, very good in bed but he also had his duties, and she hers. Ultimately she couldn’t commit to someone with whom she couldn’t see herself waking up beside every morning. You don’t get domestic bliss from an alien prince.   
  
“Like Bulma and Vegeta,” Darcy said, while coaching Jane through the process of dumping a god.   
  
“Like whom?”   
  
“You really need to brush up on pop culture, egghead.”)

So she wrestles the crowd away from human-alien relations and back to astrophysics, the intimate geometries of an ever-folding space, and the question period is, as always, cut short by stern-eyed SHIELD agents ushering her off the stage and into a taxi. You supercede Einstein and nobody bats an eye. You hit a god with your car once and -- well.

Twitter lights up with images of a spaceship. Something has appeared over the sky in New York again. Space folds in on itself (suck on that, Einstein), people scream into the internet that This Time, It Really Is The End, as if the last ten times weren’t -- not the killer robot that had picked up an entire city, not the space whales over New York, not the bomb at the UN, not the orb of glittering blue goo that had exploded out from behind a Dairy Queen in Missouri. Blurry shots of Tony Stark arcing across the sky like a meteor are met with mild interest. Blurrier shots of missing-presumed-dead Stephen Strange, MD, PhD, arcing across the sky wearing a goofy looking cape are met with a tad more interest. Thousands of people die in the chaos, probably.

Maybe Thor will be on his way; she’d heard he’d dropped by Earth in plainclothes a few months prior. Someone had tagged her in a selfie with him.

She gets off at her hotel. Tips the cabbie extraordinarily well. People have become generous in the last strange decade -- you never really know when someone else’s story is going to come to its climax in your backyard and you get turned to narrative collateral. Inside, at the lobby bar, people are gathered around a television screen, sharing a muted, half-interested conversation. Jane retires to her room and to her research, keeps Twitter and CNN open in a separate window.

Another story has come to Earth, then. She’d been there twice. After Greenwich she’d thought that this was all some act of great cosmic irony, that her home planet should be so peculiar and important; Midgard, after all, sits at the centre of the series of wormholes, the delicate curved bridge of stardust and gravitational chains the Asgardians call Yggdrasil. It bends and ebbs and every five thousand years the curve degenerates to a straight line like a tree returning upright after a storm, and all of that had converged over her head and in her blood.

Something happens in Scotland to a red man in a cape. Tony Stark goes missing. The part of Twitter that got interested in Wakandan-European relations after the UN bombing starts chattering about what sounds like Putties from Power Rangers attacking a bunch of people in a forest near Uganda.

Jane goes downstairs to the hotel restaurant and orders a hot black coffee.

The Reality Stone has returned to Earth. She feels it the same way Malekith felt it, the way it demands its presence felt; there is no force in the universe as strong as a narrative reaching its climax. Something more than fate or free will was at work here, for the Aether had wanted to be found; it had placed her in its path, had used her blood and her body to tell its story. Thor had called it the _Reality Stone_ ; Malekith had desired it to unwrite the story of Creation; it does not control one’s perception of reality, but rather harnesses the delicate threads of plot. The Aether had just recognized that the time had come to tell a story about itself.   
  
How cruel, to think of one’s life and free will as zip-tied to a plot outside of one’s control, but such was the nature of the universe, if you sat down long enough with Selvig. _Less cause and effect_ , he’d say. _More -- whatever tells a good story._

And in a way since Svartalfheim she had known that something was about to come to head, something big, something earth-shattering, something life-changing. Is she going to die? Maybe, but death’s just another chapter.   
  
_I’ll regret most never being able to see the new Star Wars,_ she thinks, abruptly. Then, even more absurdly: _did I ever see Star Wars?_ Of course she did! She’d lined up to see _The Phantom Menace_ in theaters as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshman, had her hopes dashed like everyone else, but who the hell had played Padme Amidala?

There had been this moment when the Aether was in her and she’d been near death when it had all seemed so clear, the way the narrative folded in on itself the same way space did, and she’d thought about Star Wars back then, too, and the Darren Aranofsky film _Black Swan_ , and another comic book film called -- damn it, what was it called --

 _Natalie Portman_. Not the film ( _V for Vendetta_ , starring Natalie Portman and the-man-who-was-not-Red-Skull) but the actress who was busy at the moment playing her, off screen from a film about the Reality Stone.

(in that moment she has a brief flash of insight to two people sitting in a movie theatre. _What do you think?_ Stan Lee says. _It’s okay,_ Portman says. _A bit trite. Makes me wonder if we gravitate to these kinds of stories because we want to feel something, anything, even sadness._

But it wasn’t like they could keep making these movies forever, right? It all has to end eventually.)   
  
_Oh_ , she thinks, coffee cup halfway to her mouth. That’s what this was all about; it’s not a proper arc in _Dragonball Z_ if the villain doesn’t reach its final form, and it’s not a proper story about the Reality Stone if it doesn’t, at some point, find its mates. Best if it’s in the wrong hands.

 _I don’t want to go._ Not without seeing the new Star Wars. But hey, every story ends at some point, and now’s about as good a time as any

 


End file.
